


The Way She Makes Him Feel

by mixthealphabet



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mixthealphabet/pseuds/mixthealphabet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is easy to love Jemma Simmons, but it's not easy to realize you love her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way She Makes Him Feel

_My imagination sees you like a painting by Van Gogh; starry nights and bright sunflowers follow you where you may go._

 

Everything about Jemma Simmons is light. She is bright smiles and vibrant colors, and that enthusiasm that rarely falters.

It is something that gets him by surprise, making Fitz waver under the radiance of her presence, because he has never met anyone that makes him feel like she does, and every little bit of his analytical mind says danger is written all over that girl, with big red letters and oversized arrows that point everywhere. He knows she will be the death of him but doesn’t care.

Jemma loves life, and the manner she sees the world would be almost childlike, if it wasn’t so intimately related to her several degrees and her scientific background.

She had always been a very smart child, they say.

In the beginning, Fitz doesn’t know how to respond to her. She dances around him and sings her theories with such joy that it feels like an enchantment, drawing him nearer, dragging him down. It’s the sort of thing his mother warned him about – pretty girls with smart tongues and the ability to seem sweeter than honey –, but he’d never imagined he would actually have to deal with someone like her.

The boy doesn’t regret meeting Simmons. She is delight in pretty package, wrapped in so many layers that he doesn’t think he will ever run out of things to be surprised of, and the change is strangely refreshing.

He trips and stumbles around her and when she does it as well, it looks like her mind is dropping back from the clouds. Jemma laughs and calls herself clumsy, but her smile feels warmer than it should be possible, because people aren’t supposed to be that happy, specially when embarrassed.

Fitz wonders whether or not she is faking, but the suspicion disappears after three weeks of working in the same lab, for he has never met a realer person in his entire life.

It’s a month into their partnership when he notices that he doesn’t stutter anymore. They have been friends for about a semester, one could say – she would, she _had_ said –, and they are discussing a brain activity inducer as treatment for depression, but he doesn’t know how to finish his thought process because he doesn’t have the biological background to determine exactly what are the possible damages such a device could cause, and she is suddenly completing his sentences, gesticulating widely and grinning.

He speaks clearly, she reads his thoughts.

Life, he decides, is satisfying and beautiful and a never ending adventure. _That_ is how she makes him feel.

Whatever fear he’d had when they’d first met is not present anymore, replaced by a sense of tranquility that comes with the knowledge of a friendship he can fall back on. He has never experienced a bond like the one the two of them share, and this thought brings him a joy that he’s come to associate with her.

It is easy to love Jemma Simmons.

The girl is intelligent, joyful and wise beyond her years; she has the world at her feet and plans to make it her own. Still, she latches onto him, becomes his best friend, even when other people – more interesting, brilliant people – go after her again and again.

It’s unimaginable, but it is true.

She sees something in him that Fitz can’t quite comprehend, but she pushes him to his limits, and he presses all her buttons, and although their partnership may seem codependent to others, they know they can live without the other, just choose not to.

They have been together for years now and most people know them as Fitz-Simmons (When did _that_ happen?).

The risks are higher, the time limits are shorter. Yet, Simmons smiles at him from across their pristine work place, a lab in the middle of a plane, and a plane that is called the BUS. Agents, it’s what the two are supposed to be, but Fitz feels younger than he has ever before, because miracles are happening and they are turning science on its head.

He thinks he will have a panic attack, but Simmons looks up and her eyes shine like it’s Christmas, making something akin to pain burst in his chest.

Fitz never thought of himself as a masochist, but he still likes the way she makes him feel. He leaves it at that, because overanalyzing things has never worked out too well for him.

Then, she is falling out of the BUS, eyes red and hair flying around her face. She looks beautiful, in a tragic way, because this is the first time he has ever seen her look so devastated. He screams for her, urging his best friend to come back to him.

_The anti-serum works_ , he tries to say, but her name is the only word that forms in his throat, and he too is devastated, shattered, helpless and panicked as he watches Simmons take the last jump of her unbelievably short life.

The engineer doesn’t understand how someone who appreciated life so much could lose it so early.

It’s only when he is watching his best friend tumble out into the clouds that Fitz realizes that every single time he’d thought about how easy it was to love Jemma Simmons, he’d actually been thinking of himself.

His mother was right, after all.

She makes him feel in love – maybe she always did –, and the recognition fills him with determination.

Fitz runs back to their countertop to get the anti-serum, because, if Jemma could jump out of a plane to save them, he can jump out of a plane to save her.

(Things don’t work out exactly how he plans them; half of him is panic, the other half is adrenaline, and then Ward is there as well. Poorly executed romantic gestures aside, his feelings don’t fade, but neither does his dread. Dealing with rejection was never his forte, specially when losing her becomes a possibility.

Now more than ever, Fitz fears what might be of him without Simmons.)

**Author's Note:**

> I received this prompt on tumblr and I hope I did it justice. I feel like it got extremely sappy at some points, though, and that worries me.  
> The song is All About Your Heart, by Mindy Gledhill.


End file.
